Depressed Over Blue Monday? You Should Be

Today is Blue Monday, a pseudoscientifical holiday of Depression that occurs on the third opening weekday of every January and can be dated back to 2005, when it was invented by psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall as part of a British Sky Travel campaign ad. The formula to find Blue Monday was fairly complicated and made a lot of other doctors angry, since it involves calculating in factors such as weather and broken New Year’s resolutions and was originally printed in a mental health journal like it was real.

But just because Blue Monday turned out to be a salacious bit of advertising that doesn’t make logical sense (for example, it leaves one of its terms “d” completely undefined), doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be celebrating it.

Let’s face it: Dr. Arnall picked a perfect day for his made-up experiment. Any Monday in the middle of January could accurately be described as the annual “Worst Day,” but had it occurred any earlier this year we might have been too comfortable in our windbreakers and t-shirts to find fault with the shortened days and long nights. But today we’re all experiencing our own version of blue Monday in the form of hypothermia.

In other news, today remains Martin Luther King Day here in America. Double holiday!